Measuring a team's average height, part II

In yesterday's post, I mentioned idea #1:

1. Inside shooting (due to Ken Pomeroy)

Today I want to mention a stat which, for lack of a better term, I'm currently calling

2. Inside Defense

The stat is

Inside Def = (blocks + 1)/(steals + blocks + 2)

Now, for an individual, this number is probably pretty useless. I could imagine an athletic SF or PF being tops on his team in both blocks and steals; moreover, a high ratio could mean either lots of blocks, or just not many steals.

For teams, though, I think this number might prove a little more interesting. At a quick glance around SEC stat pages, it appears that most teams get more steals than blocks, but the numbers are fairly comparable--the larger is never more than about twice the smaller.

Of course, there are numbers that speak more readily to where a team does its defensive damage. Opponents' offensive rebound rate, opponents' FG%, opponents' 3FG%, etc. I would love to have a way to combine all of the above in an interesting way, but of course rebounding and shooting stats dwarf steal and block stats, so there's no obvious way to do it.

For now, call my inside defense rating a novelty stat: interesting, but not really useful. It's a quick comparison of two largely under-noticed stats, which tend to come from two different areas of the floor.

I'll track it, and see if anything interesting can be said. I'll also try to come up with a more thorough inside/outside defensive number.

But as far as scaling a team's effective height, this one's useless. More tomorrow...